Xenoscan – Open source memory scanner written in C++

XenoScan is a memory scanner which can be used to scan the memory of processes to locate the specific locations of important values.

These types of tools are typically used when hacking video games, as they allow one to locate the values representing the game’s state in memory.

XenoScan is written in C++ with a Lua frontend, and I’ve been working on advanced functionality that goes beyond anything that has been in any other memory scanners I’ve seen. Notably, it has a way to enumerate and return all complex data structures (such as std::list and std::map) in the target’s memory space, and it can even scan for any class instances and group the discovered instances by their underlying types.

Communication

If you need to get in touch with me, want a place to chat, or have a question, my Discord is the best place.

Sub-projects

XenoLua

XenoLua is a wrapper around Lua that provides a ton of functionality. Most notably, it provides a LuaVariant class which wraps the functionality of converting between C/C++ and Lua types. Additionally, it has helper functions for working with Lua in the LuaPrimitive class.

XenoScanEngine

XenoScanEngine is the meat of the project. It contains the code for the scanning, data structure detection, and everything else.

XenoScanLua

XenoScanLua ties XenoScanEngine to XenoLua to provide a Lua-scriptable frontend for the scanner. Currently, this is the only entry-point to the scanner.

Additionally, this project contains some test code that ensures everything is working properly. A test is a combination of a .cpp, a .h, and a .lua file. For examples on how to use the scanner, you can check out the .lua test files.

Compiling

XenoScan uses CMake, and has been tested with Visual Studio 2017. In theory, you should be able to build the code with any modernish compiler, as long as you use CMake to generate the project files. Before you can compile, you will need to make sure you’ve checked out the submodules. Once that’s done, you’ll also have to build the luajit submodule so XenoScan can link against the libraries.

If you’re using Visual Studio, this should be easy. Simply run buildmsvc2017.bat from a Developer Command Prompt for VS. As an example, to build a project for Visual Studio 2017, I run

cd C:\path\to\XenoScan
buildmsvc2017.bat

Which would make a file named XenoScan.sln appear in my build directory (e.g. C:\path\to\XenoScan\build).

The main development of XenoScan is done on this version of Visual Studio.

If you’re on another system or using another compiler or IDE, you’ll have to build luajit on your own and run CMake manually.

Platform

The code is designed to be platform-agnostic. Theoretically, to compile on any other platform, you would need to

Create project/make files for your target IDE/compiler.

Remove the ScannerTargetWindows.cpp and ScannerTargetWindows.h files from the project.